5of5Dave and Denise Smith (left) at Tony Nik’s bar and lounge in North Beach.Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

The sign outside Tony Nik’s on Stockton Street has seen better days. The curves of each letter have darkened, and it’s tricky to make out the “Nik’s” at all; the word was painted in a patchy white rectangle on top of the original “Nicco’s” when longtime bartender Charles Lavagnino — known to everyone as Butch — purchased the bar from its original owners, Angelina and Antonio Nicco, in 1951.

But Angelina and Antonio’s grandson, Mark Nicco, who bought the bar with his husband Dan Kent when Butch retired in 2000, can’t bear to replace the original sign. “I’ve been told it’s too old to re-neon,” he says, “but I can’t bring myself to take it down.”

When Nicco was a child, he’d come down from the Marina to visit his grandfather at the bar each Sunday after church. “He would sit up in the corner table, reading the newspaper, drinking his orange juice. Growing up, I always thought this place was so cool.”

Tony Nik’s is old-school but not kitschy, clean but not snobby, fun but not divey. It’s the kind of place you want to bring a particularly promising date to chat at a cozy back table over potent boulevardiers. It’s the sort of spot where you can gather a crowd of friends for beers before heading out for pizza, or roll in solo to talk with whoever’s working that night.

“You walk in a stranger and you leave as a friend,” says manager Sebastian Scala, who fell in love with the bar in 2004 and claims to know 65 percent of its patrons on any given night.

On the eve of Tony Nik’s 85th anniversary, I ask Nicco and Scala how the bar has changed — and stayed the same — over the years. “In my grandfather’s days,” Nicco says, “it was absolute locals here. The bar was an extension of people’s living rooms. It wasn’t the same bar culture we have now.” Tony Nicco served his go-to bourbon, Old Crow (which is still in the well here), and he was known for his holiday batch of manhattans, which he aged in the fridge with tangerine and lemon zest instead of bitters. His grandson still makes the recipe every year.

Tony Nik’s on Stockton Street in North Beach celebrated its 85th anniversary. It is now run by the grandson of the original owners, who opened it as Tony Nicco’s.

Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle

This space wasn’t always a bar, though. Antonio and Angelina Nicco came to North Beach from Northern Italy in the 1910s and bought the building at 1534 Stockton St., moving into the apartment upstairs. They set up a French laundry called Madame Nicco’s at street level, in the space where Tony Nik’s now stands.

Angelina gave birth to Nicco’s father in the office that’s still used for bar administration today. “I guess it happened during work,” Nicco laughs. “When you own your own business, you gotta be here, right?”

They were ready to convert the ground floor into a bar and cafe by December 1933: “They’d been making wine — and perhaps other things — downstairs during Prohibition,” Nicco says. In those days, the mafia tried to muscle into the local liquor business, but the legend goes that Tony was known to stand on the roof brandishing a rifle. He stayed independent.

Mark Nicco, who now owns Tony Nik’s in North Beach, remembers visiting his grandfather, the original owner, at the bar on Sundays after church.

Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

Over the decades, Tony Nik’s continued to be a place where regulars could be counted on. In 1994, Herb Caen interviewed the 78-year old Lavagnino for The Chronicle, noticing that he’d pushed the bar’s opening from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. after taking a break to recover from an illness. “Well,” he explained to Caen, “I got five 9 a.m. customers and four died while I was out, and the fifth moved to Petaluma.”

Lavagnino would close the bar each evening in time for dinner — or sooner if the ice, which was kept in a fridge in the back, ran out. That fridge was so inconvenient that he’d grab two beers if you ordered one. “Butch wasn’t going to shuffle back there again. It was too far. So he’d just bring you two beers,” Nicco recalls.

Regulars always drank Campari drinks and Fernet Branca at Tony Nik’s, and today the bar sells so much Fernet that it’s among the top accounts in the city. Nicco chuckles, saying, “When I was a kid, Fernet was medicine. When you were sick, if your mother was Italian, she’d give you a shot of Fernet. If you didn’t want to drink it,” he explains, “then you weren’t sick.”

Bartender Devon Hersh at Tony Nik’s bar and lounge in North Beach.

Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

These days, we take our medicine gladly (it’s offered as a shot-and-beer special called the Happy Meal for 10 bucks), or go for an excellent old-fashioned ($11), made with 100-proof rye, plenty of muddled orange peel, and instead of sugar, a dollop of the syrup from Luxardo cherries. Moscow Mules and French 75s are popular, and on a crowded night, you may need to dodge an errant selfie stick. But while time marches on, Tony Nik’s still feels a bit like a friend’s living room.

More Information

Some nights, the music’s mellow, shifting from Dylan to Emmylou Harris, but on a recent Monday, our bartender turned it up and danced a little from one side of the bar to another, watching the game between pours. He was wearing knitted 49ers garb worthy of any Ugly Christmas Sweater prize, and brought us into the fold of conversation, inquiring about our holiday plans.

There’s no fireplace at Tony Nik’s, but it feels warm, still.

“Despite all the changes in San Francisco,” Nicco tells me later, “North Beach is still an incredible neighborhood, with a lot of history, and this old bar is really a part of it. I don’t take any credit for the success of this place — it’s the place.”

Maggie Hoffman is the author of “The One-Bottle Cocktail: More than 80 Recipes With Fresh Ingredients and a Single Spirit” (Ten Speed Press). Twitter: @maggiejhoffman Email: food@sfchronicle.com